


Achilles

by pprfaith



Series: Like the Greeks [5]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Depression, Derek's an angsty douchewolf, F/M, Family, Found Family, Gore, Guilt, Loss of Virginity, Moving On, Pack Dynamics, Podfic Welcome, Rule 63, Stiles is technically a minor, Unreliable Narrator, Violence, and also kind of sexist, but we love him really, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:05:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5038570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek hates Stiles.</p><p>(Or: Sourwolf's point of view on this series.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Achilles

**Author's Note:**

> I promised to post this months ago, finished it, forgot I'd finished it, found it, edited a little and now here we are. Sorry for the delay. Not beta read.

+

He dreams of Laura every night, her glassy eyes, her waxy skin, the way she felt when he carried her through the woods, back home. 

The way her insides were outside and his chest felt hollow where Alpha used to be. 

He dreams of her and he wakes shaking but there is no-one there to hold him through it. The only person who ever did is dead. 

+

Derek hates Stiles. 

He hates her constant babble, the way she can’t stop moving, her irreverence for life and death situations, her big fucking mouth and her constant. Babble. 

He hates that he can feel her heart stop-start in terror and she still spits smart-ass comments in his face, how she gets turned on when he slams her into walls instead of scared, how she is always, always right and _never_ afraid of saying “I told you so”.

He hates that she’s sixteen and can’t decide whether to be a boy or a girl, that her limbs are coltish and unpredictable and her taste in clothing is that of a teenage boy from the nineties, that she chews on everything she can get her hands on, wears her hair chopped short with dull scissors and still, somehow, manages to make him want to fuck her. 

He hates how loyal she is to people who did nothing to deserve it and how she tells him she hates him on a weekly basis, but still lets him sleep in her room after accusing him of murder, how she calls him Sourwolf and pretends he’s joking when he threatens to rip her throat out and how she is _Stiles_ , and he didn’t even know that that was an option until he met her in the woods. He didn’t know that _Stiles_ was something that existed and only a few short months later, he can’t remember what life was like without her in it. 

Derek _hates_ Stiles. 

+

When he shows up in her room after she and Scott make him the Most Wanted in three states, he half expects her to holler for help at the top of her lungs and for him to end up in jail for multiple murders.

Half hopes for it, if he’s honest, because then at least it’d be over. He wouldn’t have to be alone anymore, responsible for a newly bitten idiot. He wouldn’t have to make _decisions_ anymore, because Derek has never been good at those. Just look at what happened with Kate. With Paige. Decisions. That’s what he had an alpha for. 

He had his mother and then Laura to tell him where to go and what to do and there’s freedom in that, even if humans always smelled of pity when Laura commanded him about and he just went. 

So if Stiles wanted to scream for the Sheriff sitting in the living room, that would have been alright with Derek. 

Somehow. 

But she doesn’t. Instead she hisses and spits at him like a kitten and then throws an oversized police academy t-shirt at him and tells him that he’s sleeping on the fucking floor, thank you very much, and if he pervs on her, she’s mace-ing him.

“Like, I’m not even kidding, I am skinny and mouthy and the fastest Mace draw this side of anywhere, just ask fucking Greenburg.”

He strips out of his bloody t-shirt and jacket, puts on the clean one and for hours watches her stumble around her room like she’s perpetually surprised by her own limbs and when she turns out the light and flings a pillow at him, he obediently lies down, just because she wants him to sleep. She orders him to, and he doesn’t know how much he fucking wants that until he’s already flat on the floor, in a t-shirt that smells of a stranger, with a pillow that smells of a little girl with wolf eyes. 

Derek tries to sleep. 

He does. 

But Stiles’ breathing is as irregular as the rest of her and she keeps windmilling around and the Sheriff is cleaning his gun in his room, the smell of cordite and oil strong in Derek’s nose and there is an alpha out there that wants them all dead and a beta who can’t control _anything_ and he misses Laura. 

She would have tried to smother him with a pillow by now, just so he’d, “Stop with your emo shit, Der, I can smell it from over here, oh god.”

And then Stiles groans and rolls to the edge of her bed to glare down at him. He wonders how well she can see him in the dark. He’s never been human, he doesn’t understand their limitations. 

“This is like the one time dad brought home a K9 puppy. The poor guy kept piddling on everything because the floor was so cold and his bed wasn’t soft enough and he’d only stop if I let him into my bed. He slobbered. It was adorable.”

Derek snarls, automatic response to being compared to a fucking _dog_ , but then the girl raises her Star Wars duvet and gives him an expectant look. If he weren’t so pathetic, he’d turn over and ignore her offer, but despite the little grin on her face, she mostly just looks tired and nervous and he _is_ pathetic. 

So he climbs into bed and curls himself into the space between her and the wall, not because the floor was really that uncomfortable – he’s squatting in his burnt out family home – but because Stiles is warm and alive and prey-soft in the belly and the last person who touched Derek in a way that didn’t mean pain, was Laura, five weeks and three days ago, when she told him not to flood the damn apartment while she was gone.

They both lie there, on their backs, and Stiles is probably reconsidering inviting a wanted man into her bed, because she’s stiff as a board, and then she runs off at the mouth, as always when she’s nervous. 

“So, this is cozy. I mean, not that I do this, or have done this, before, but it seems cozy, like maybe with other people, it wouldn’t, except Scott. I do this with Scott, like, all the time, and it’s completely harmless and this is harmless, too, I mean, right, it’s not like you’re going to go all rapey on me or anything, right? Or, like…”

“Stiles,” he growls, eyes closed against the flash of blue that always makes her heartbeat skitter like a terrified rodent. 

She stops. 

Her smell turns annoyed-sour and she snaps, “Well, sorry, dude, if my pillow talk is not to your liking, you can always go back to the ruins of your house and sleep in the ashes, I mean, that is an option and I – “

He hates that Stiles can be so casually cruel, that she dares bring up his family, his mistake, his guilt and shame and loss like that, can just throw it in his face, and at the same time, he admires her ability to not pull punches. 

Stiles isn’t ever careful, not with anything or anyone, but she doesn’t expect others to be careful with her either, and that’s…Derek wonders if it’s learned behavior, this casual disregard for everything, but he never asks. 

It calms him down. 

He rolls onto his front with a grunt and throws an arm over the girl’s stomach, where she’s all soft and open, organs just beneath the skin. She stiffens and then relaxes. He curls his fingers into her side and thinks about how it would feel to sink his claws into the milky, warm flesh there, wonders if she understands her position. There is an apex predator in her bed, with his hand on her most vulnerable part and all it would take to gut her is a tiny flick of his wrist. 

He wonders if she understands what it means that she lets him keep his arm there, just sighs and grumps, “Alright then, snuggle time. If you drool on me, I will still fucking mace you.”

And then she falls asleep like he’s nothing to be scared of. 

He hates her for that, too. 

+

He wonders, sometimes, if Stiles has this huge blind spot when it comes to the composition of their pack, or if she knows the truth and simply refuses to acknowledge it. 

Both are possible. 

Because she keeps going on and on about how Derek found the perfect people for his pack, his Island of Misfit Toys, as she calls it. The broken, the used, the abused, the lonely and sick. 

Jackson, with so much to prove, so much aimless love and devotion to give, Isaac with his scars and bruises and nightmares, who would kill for someone to hold him without causing him pain. Erica, who will raze cities to get a taste of life, to _experience_ , where she was never allowed to before, and Boyd, who’d give the world just to not be alone anymore. 

He picks them because they’re broken, because they need him as much as he needs them, because there is no loyalty like that of a beaten dog to his new, gentle master. 

That, Stiles knows. 

He just can’t ever figure out if she knows that she’s part of that, too, not just a girl who randomly ended up in his pack, no, but someone he courted, like he did the others, someone he chose. 

From the moment she invites him into his bed, the first time she saves the day with knowledge and cleverness, he knows he has to have her. The pool cements it, two hours of fragile human almost drowning herself, just to keep him alive because that kind of loyalty you can’t buy. 

At first he hesitates, because she is so young, so human, but he craves her loyalty, the kind she shows to Scott and her father, that unwavering, unquestioning thing, for himself, even before his eyes turn red. 

He doesn’t court her like the others then, because he thinks he already has her (with Scott comes Stiles, only Scott is lying) and because he doesn’t want to risk her. He knows she doesn’t want to be a wolf and humans are so, so breakable. 

But then she climbs out of her battered jeep with a bat in her hand and the next thing Derek knows, she’s standing over the prone body of Gerard Argent, heaving deep breaths, holding her ribs. Her face is splattered with black blood and her hands slip on her weapon, but she looks at them all with ice-cold challenge in her amber gaze and Derek understands that there is nothing breakable left in Stiles Stilinski. 

If there ever was anything to break to begin with.

Derek wants her because she’s as broken as the rest of his pack, as twisted and lonely and damaged, just like the others, just like Isaac, like Erica and Boyd and Jackson. 

In a way, she’s even more broken than them, he thinks, because they were made and Derek suspects that Stiles might be one of those rare people that are born damaged, born with a bitter taste in their mouth, cynicism in their veins and a hole in their hearts. He can imagine her, six, eight, twelve years old and bitingly bitter, viciously angry at the world. 

Sure, her mother is dead and her father is just one missed dinner away from being a drunk deadbeat, but when he looks at Stiles, Derek can’t imagine her whole and unjaded, can’t imagine her as anything but the old soul she is. 

Stiles, he thinks, has never been anything but what she is and that is why she fits in his pack so perfectly, why, after Gerard, he hunts her until she gives in.

Pack. 

As she should be.

+

Derek hates Peter, too, and, funny enough, in almost the same ways he hates Stiles. 

The man is his uncle, Uncle Peter, the coolest adult, his favorite family member, the one he could always count on. 

And he’s the one that killed Laura, that killed Kate (when she was Derek’s kill, when some teenage part of him loved her still, when she was _his_ ), that started a fucking war and then laughed in Derek’s face as he died. 

He’s the one to blame for Derek being the alpha. 

He’s the one to blame for Scott and a million things that cascaded out from that night, the night in the woods, Laura dead and Scott changed. 

And then he’s dead and Derek _misses_ him, the same was he misses Laura, whom Peter _killed_. 

Jesus fuck. 

He wants to kill Peter the night he comes back. Rip his throat out again, burn him, scatter the ashes. 

But he can’t. Because Peter is still _Peter_ and because he can’t burn the man, not even his dead body, throat slit. He can’t give Peter to fire, not again. He’s not Stiles. Derek is not capable of cruelty. 

So he lets him live, lets him tag along, and then watches as the older man carefully steps up to a frozen, shell-shocked Stiles and gently, gently takes the bat from her.

“You’ve won,” he whispers to her. “You’ve killed him, Stiles. He can’t hurt you again.”

And Scott makes a wounded, questioning noise, like he can’t smell the bloodpainfear on Stiles, the stench of bruises and metal, and who else could have possibly done this? Why else would Stiles murder a man in cold blood, why, if not for that? 

Derek inhales, searching for other scents, for semen and latex and foreign sweat and lets relief flood him when there is nothing there. 

“I killed him,” she says, dazed, and lets Peter, of all people, put an arm around her. He meets Derek’s gaze over her head and under the wry amusement, the eternal, biting humor, there is something like worry, something that looks almost like Peter _likes_ Stiles. 

Jesus fuck. 

“Yes you did,” he tells her, voice still soft, crooning. “You killed him just like you killed me. You’re so good at that, Stiles. So good,” he praises and it’s wrong, it’s twisted and perverse and fucking creepy, but Stiles slumps into him, all the fight gone out of her. 

She mutters something that sounds like, “Set you on fire, fucking creeper wolf.”

Then, belatedly, she shakes off his hands and turns to stare at the last two Argents, fire in her gaze. “Do we have a problem?” she asks.

Beside Allison, Scott opens his mouth, asks, “Stiles?”

She ignores him completely. 

When Chris looks from her to his father’s body and then back, shakes his head, she nods. “Alright,” she tells the room at large and then turns and walks back to her jeep, past everyone. 

She gets in the car, coaxes the engine to life and then leaves without a look back. 

“Oh,” Peter says and he sounds excited.

Derek snarls at him. “Don’t you dare,” he hisses, because he remembers Peter’s girlfriends, remembers the way they were always a little too meek, a little too quiet and how Peter was always his favorite, but never quite right, even Before.

He thinks that maybe, the reason he recognized Stiles’ perpetual brokenness so easily was because he’s had a lifetime to study it in Peter, who has never, never been whole to begin with. 

His uncle laughs, honestly delighted and bares his throat. “Of course, my dear nephew. I wouldn’t want to poach.”

Derek _hates_ him. 

+

Laura’s corpse laughs at him, jeers, “You couldn’t even avenge our family on your own, Derek. Had to let a sixteen-year-old girl do it. Just like you had to have her kill Peter, too weak to do it yourself. How pathetic are you?!”

+

His favorite part of Stiles is her belly. 

It’s the only softness on her angular frame, all pale skin and dark moles, the center of her, the part no-one else ever sees because she’s not like Lydia, who likes to show off her body. Stiles keeps herself private, even after the redhead overhauls her wardrobe and buys her clothes that actually fit. And were made for women. In this century. 

But that’s not why he loves it. 

He loves it because it reminds him of that night in her room, two strangers with a strange, tentative closeness between them, and because of all it represents. It’s the vulnerable part of her and she lets him close, trusts him there. Trusts him. It’s submission, too, and the heat of her body, the pounding and rushing of her blood, it’s the way the wolf in him wants to claw her open, wants to burrow inside her in a very literal way and surround himself in her warmth, her flesh, her skin. 

He wants to know what her insides taste like, wants to den there and never leave. 

Derek never lets himself, holds back to only ever nibble and suck and scratch, fangs and claws, yes, but never more than bruises, never more than a drop of blood. He reigns himself in because to tear into Stiles would satisfy the darker part of him, yes, but it would leave him without her at the end of the day. 

To keep Stiles, he must keep her whole and, gods above and below, Derek will burn this world to ashes to keep her. 

Her belly is his favorite part of her and even before she invites him into her, he buries his face there, close and warm and alive, inhales her, listens to her live, to her life in his hands. 

He thinks she doesn’t get it, thinks she’d never let him do this if she knew what it meant, but then, one day, when they’re lying on her bed, her on her back and him at angles, nose rubbing against her navel, she puts her hand on his neck, blunt nails digging onto his pulse point and he – 

\- stops.

“Stiles,” he rumbles, a warning. 

Her nails dig in harder. “Turnabout is fair play, Sourwolf,” she says, easy as can be. 

She’s done it before, he realizes, her hand on his neck, his shoulders, just resting there, and he didn’t even notice, didn’t think anything of it because she’s human. Stiles is human.

But her eyes shine beta gold in the light and she snarls and fights and she knows what goes through his head when he buries his face in her soft underbelly. She knows. 

He drags his nose up her ticklish side, all the way to her ribs, and when he looks up at her, he finds himself grinning, boyish and open and honestly delighted, and she grins back and somehow, _I want to murder that brat_ , turned into _I will kill for that woman_ and Derek doesn’t understand how, but his wolf rumbles, content, and so he lets it be. 

+

“I love that movie,” Boyd announces, quietly, voice getting lost under Stiles and Erica’s horrible rendition of the opening credits of _The Labyrinth_. 

Derek, sitting next to him, nudges him in the shoulder to show he heard.

“My sister used to watch it all the time,” he confesses, quietly. It feels like it should hurt more than it does, remembering Laura in her PJs and pigtails, dancing through the living room like David Bowie. 

She always tried to make him and Cora into her goblin minions, much to their vocal dismay. 

Boyd snorts without turning to look at Derek, staring instead at the girls, screaming lyrics at each other like it’s going out of style. 

+

He first discovers her thing for lists when he uses her bathroom to clean up and finds himself staring at a sheet of paper taped next to the mirror, tally marks in chunky green marker going up to sixty-three.

“It’s my Adderall,” she says, when he asks about it, days later and apropos of nothing. 

They’re eating Chinese in the living room because her father is out and somehow, she still hasn’t thrown him to the dogs. He wonders why and doesn’t ask anymore. 

He finds other lists, to do lists falling out of her school things, sticky notes taped to her screen, the lampshade next to it, the wall above it. 

_Werewolves_ , one of them says, cramped onto a little square of yellow, hidden by an old report card. _Wolfsbane, fire, decapitation?_

He knows how she knows about fire killing werewolves and feels sick, turns his head away, lets her write her lists, and pretends he never reads them.

It’s childish, dangerous, stupid, to write these things down, but he never says a word, just lets her scribble away, bullet point after bullet point, as if she’ll find some sort of sanity at the end of it, as if she’ll give all this madness some sort of meaning.

On the back of _How to be a ~~Good~~ Better Alpha_ , there are indents of letters written on another piece of paper. Invisible to a human, he guesses, but all it takes Derek is a little concentration. 

_Shitty Things_ , it reads. _Blood on clothes, nightmares, Scott ditching me, panic attacks, fear, being alone, too much homework, no sleep, lying, killing, Harris_.

It turns what’s left of his heart into confetti, even as he tells himself he has no right to mourn for things that aren’t his. 

+

“Isaac!” Stiles howls, as loud and sharp as any wolf, calling him back form where he’s about to launch himself into a tangle of witch-conjured coyotes. Derek isn’t sure they’re corporeal, because they sure as hell don’t act like it when he cuts or bites them, but the opposite doesn’t hold true, so mostly they defend and fall back.

All except Isaac, who Stiles snaps at ferociously as he detours at the last second and lopes toward them. As soon as he’s within reach, Stiles yanks him past herself to where Erica is kneeling, arm shattered. Boyd and Jackson are further out, taking the long way around the fight to come from the back. 

Derek is slightly off to one side, batting magical coyotes away again and again and again. He’s not exactly tiring, but neither are they. Peter is a mile out, with Lydia on his back, approaching fast.

Isaac takes up guard duty over Erica as she heals, hissing and growling all the way, arm cradled to her chest. 

And Stiles, the quickly-becoming-infamous bat in one hand, posts herself in front of them, legs spread at shoulder-width and knees bent, to defend them both.

Derek can feel her determination thrumming across the pack bonds, can feel his other betas racing toward the battle.

He grabs one of the coyotes out of the air, hooks clawed hands into its jaws and pulls, momentarily forgetting that they’re only constructs. The top of its head comes off with a sickening crunch and a moment later, it falls to dust with nothing but a few sparks to indicate that magic was ever in play. 

Briefly, the battle pauses and he meets Stiles’ gaze across the clearing, sees realization brighten her eyes. 

“Oh, hell yeah,” she crows, and when the next attack comes, she digs in her heels and swings her bat just in time for Isaac and Erica to fall in beside her, ready to fight again. 

By the time Peter breaks through the foliage with Lydia strolling after and a bleeding witch in his grasp, the coyotes are all gone. 

Derek throws his head back and howls.

+

He takes her virginity in the darkness of her childhood bedroom, her sounds muffled against the pillows, like he hasn’t taken enough from her already. 

She’s stopped writing lists, except for the most important, has stopped talking to her father, her best friend. She doesn’t chase her Lydia-shaped dream anymore, doesn’t sit in on lacrosse practice, and snarls with all her teeth on display, like the wolf Peter says she is, his lips curled with dark pleasure. 

After all this, taking her virginity is just another tally against him, another thing he’s stolen from a teenage girl not even old enough to vote. One more line to obliterate with her, bright-eyed and eager, not realizing what he’s doing. 

Derek always feels guilty. It’s been his default state of being since he was sixteen and he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop, but as he lies next to Stiles, shoulders touching on her narrow bed, she whispers, “Stop angsting so hard, Derek. It’s kind of a turn off when the guy you just had sex with looks like he’s going to start crying any second.”

Derek rolls onto his side, away from her, closes his eyes. Fire, death, blonde hair, and ashes. Business as usual. 

“We shouldn’t have done that,” he says and a second later, she punches him in the kidneys. Hard. It hurts more than it should, coming from a frail little human. But then, all her punches have been too hard lately, all her sprints too fast. 

“You asshole!” she snarls and he doesn’t need to see her to know: teeth. “You do not get to do this, you freaking jackass!”

“You’re seventeen,” he retorts, rolling back until he’s flat again because hiding from Stiles is kind of pointless. She just digs you up and keeps poking until you have no choice but to look at her.

“Give me a fucking break, Sourwolf. That’s a shit argument and you know it. I decided to have sex with you. I climbed on top of you and I took off my damn clothes and you do not get to take that on. My choices belong to _me_. You have no fucking right to them, get that?!”

She looms over him at the end, faces close enough to kiss, and her words are fierce, even as her heart pitter-patter gives away her insecurity. “You don’t get to take that on,” she repeats, for emphasis, eyes narrowed.

Seventeen and naked, skinny and breakable and cruel and ferocious and the strongest person he’s ever met. 

He turns them over, pulls her under him and buries his face in her neck so he doesn’t have to look her in the eye as he says, “I love you.”

Under his ear, her heart stops, skips a beat, and then races on.

+

“What are you doing with Stiles?” Scott demands, brash and brave and fucking stupid, as always.

As far as Derek knows, Stiles plays computer games with him once a week and talks to him at school. He’s cut out of the rest of her life, with the kind of surgical precision he knows by now is as typical of Stiles as he perpetual messes.

“None of your business, Scott,” he tells the littlest beta, not bothering to keep the growl out of his voice. 

Scott grabs his arm and Derek flashes red at him until the kid backs off. At the back of the property, Erica and Boyd and Isaac stir, stopping their games to come closer. They break out of the woods and Scott actually jumps, surprised. 

More omega than beta, then. 

Derek can’t say he feels sorry for the boy. 

“Stiles is my best friend,” Scott snaps, as soon as he regains his composure, and Erica _snarls_ , teeth snapping. 

“In your fucking dreams, McCall! You abandoned her to fuck around with the granddaughter of the man who kidnapped and tortured her, you asshole!”

“I didn’t know!”

“You would have if you’d listened to her!”

None of them did, not back then, but the pack has made amends. Scott hasn’t. Erica crouches, ready to fight, and Derek decides to interfere. Stiles won’t like it if they beat up her puppy. 

“Erica,” he says, low. “Calm down. Scott. You want to know what I’m doing with Stiles?”

He waits for the boy to nod before speaking plainly. 

“Everything. I’m doing _everything_ with her, because Stiles is _mine_ and I plan to keep her. Anything else is between her and me. And now run, before I let my pack tear you apart.”

He doesn’t bother with the eyes, the fangs, the claws, with looming and shaking and threatening. 

He just states the facts as they are: Scott threw Stiles to the wayside as soon as he had a girl, first line, popularity, and Derek was there and maybe he snuck in under the wire when she was defenseless, maybe he wormed his way where he’s not supposed to be, but Stiles let him and he’s learning not to take on other people’s choices.

(Stiles has instituted an aversion therapy. When he guilt trips himself, he doesn’t get sex. He hates it because it works.)

Scott’s lost. Derek’s won. 

The boy turns tail and runs. 

+

“So, Scott tells me I belong to you. That I’m yours,” Stiles starts, all casual. In the corner of the living room, Peter snorts a laugh and then politely removes himself just far enough to be out of sight and still hear everything. 

Asshole. 

“You are,” Derek says, because she is.

Stiles chews on her bottom lip for a moment, head cocked to one side. Then she grins, sunrise bright. “And you’re mine, buddy, and don’t you forget it.”

+

He tries it, once, just once. Writing lists. 

After spending hours, weeks, months, watching Stiles chewing on pencils and putting her life into neat bullet points, he tries it. Maybe, he thinks, it’ll be the key to controlling the bloody mess his life has become. 

He waits until he’s alone, which is rare since he’s become alpha, and then sneaks into the spot he still thinks of as his mother’s, that spot on the porch railing where it’s broad enough to sit. Stiles has claimed it, months ago, but he still suffers from double vision when he looks at her sitting there and he knows Peter feels the same way. 

The older wolf stinks of regret and loss every time he passes her there, book perched on her legs. 

For a long while, Derek stares at the blank paper, scribbles _Things that went wrong_ , strikes it out, writes _Things to Fix_ under it. 

Half an hour later _Things that Matter_ contains the names of every single member of his pack, followed by Scott, his mother, Stiles’ father and, reluctantly, even Deaton. 

He knew this already. 

_Things I Need_ , then. The pencil falters on the paper after the second S of Stiles’ name, refusing to write more. 

It’s a declaration he can’t voice, won’t voice, refuses to leave evidence of. She’s seventeen, for fuck’s sake. She’s seventeen and she’s cruel and hard and grown-up but no-one should be responsible for keeping another human being from drowning. 

Least of all seventeen-year-old girls who are inexplicably in love with train wrecks. 

He flushes the crumpled pieces of paper down the toilet and ignores Peter’s jeers from the hallway, mocking him. 

+

When his mother was alive, she was alpha, always, undisputed. Laura was her heir, her alpha-in-waiting. 

Peter was their weaver. 

Derek’s father, Paul, was their enforcer.

Deaton was their emissary. 

Derek, Cora, his cousins, uncles, aunts, they were betas. Soldiers. Followers. The ones born to give the pack stability, give it power. Their eyes shone golden in the dark and they followed where they were led, obeyed when given orders. 

Five pillars in a pack, he remembers his grandmother teaching him over hot chocolate and old history. Alpha, Weaver, Enforcer, Emissary, Betas. 

The weaver for the wolf, the emissary for the human. The enforcer for violence, the betas for peace. 

And the alpha to unite them all, to rule them. 

A perfect balance, a network, a safety line. Four corners and a roof. Grandma Hale had pictures to go with her words, and a patient, gentle smile for her grandchildren, eager to learn their places. 

Derek remembers Peter sitting in, sometimes, twanging pack bonds to distract them, earning laughter and a swat upside the head. 

Then: fire. 

There is no balance now. There is an enforcer who is also an emissary, human and violence all tangled up. There are bitten betas, too new to sink into the right instincts, who follow after her because she leads. Their weaver is more monster than wolf and their alpha isn’t fit to rule any of them. 

Talia would be so ashamed. 

+

“We’re alive,” Stiles tells him, after the kanima, after Gerard, after vampires and trolls and homicidal spirits and fucking minotaurs.

“We’re alive.”

It sounds like a surprised observation, at first, but as time goes on, as the scars on her body grow more and her eyes grow fiercer, her teeth sharper, it becomes a rallying cry, a howl of victory. 

We’re alive. 

We’re alive, alive, alive. 

In college, Derek read Silvia Plath. He never much enjoyed her poetry, but he felt every word of her prose, felt her traitorous heart in his own chest, beating _I am, I am, I am_. 

With Stiles knocking him over in the middle of a battle field, kneeling astride him and kissing him until his vision dims, he begins to understand the fierce joy in that. 

_I am_. 

“Yeah,” he mumbles around fangs, pulling back from her lips, pushing her hair out of her face in sticky clumps. “We are.”

She grins. 

+

“I thought it would be different,” Erica tells him one night. One of the rare nights Stiles isn’t there but she is. She crawls into bed next to him in panties and one of Boyd’s t-shirts and snuggles into his side, her hair all over the place. 

“What would?” he asks, arm coming up to wrap around her shoulders. To protect her, even if it’s too late for that. 

Her voice is quiet when she answers, more like the little girl she was before he made her a monster. “Being a werewolf. I expected… less _Supernatural_ and more, I don’t know, _Anita Blake_? Being strung up and tortured in a basement didn’t feature.”

He doesn’t understand the reference, but he can guess at what it means. 

“I explained the risks to you.”

“Yeah, you did. But Derek,” she rolls up and away, coming to sit by his hip, curled into herself. Her eyes glow gold in the dark. “You promised to make us gods. No warning in the world would have made any of us say no.”

He told them. He told there are hunters, told them they might die. But what concept do a bunch of sixteen-year-olds have of death? He didn’t understand it when he was sixteen. Not until he returned home from school to ashes and screams. 

“But that’s why you picked us, isn’t it?”

She doesn’t look like that sixteen-year-old girl anymore, or the seventeen-year-old she is now. She looks immeasurably older than either. 

“Because you knew we couldn’t say no. You knew… you needed us. And you made damn sure you got us.” He wonders if Erica has always been this cruel, or if it’s something she learned. And if so, was it him who taught her?

But not a single word from her lips is a lie and that’s the worst thing. Derek hates her for it, a little. 

“You needed soldiers for the war you knew was coming. And you picked three kids you knew couldn’t say no when you offered them the world.” She picks up his left hand, plays with his fingers like the lover she once thought he’d be. 

He seduced her. Red eyes and promised of a better life, hands under her hospital shift, a careful slide of skin up her legs, he seduced her like Kate seduced him. Like – 

She yanks on his wrist, claws gouging into his skin and he snarls. She smiles and scoots sideways until she can rest her head on his hip, still facing him. “It’s okay, though,” she goes on. “I forgive you.”

Derek hates her. 

+

Deaton and Derek watch Stiles wobble her way out of the examination room with her shoulder freshly bandaged, muttering about fucking ghouls, what the fuck. 

For a little girl, she has a hell of a filthy mouth. 

Deaton sighs, starts packing up his materials. “You are starting to get a reputation, Derek,” he observes, quietly, while Derek is still trying to determine what he’s going to do with Stiles’ ripped flannel shirt. It’s kind of ruined, but with Stiles, clothes are an iffy subject. 

He stops, shirt in hand, the scent of pack blood in his nose. “Yeah?”

“For being ruthless and vicious,” the vet expounds, putting his tools into the sterilizer. 

“The pack?” Derek asks, “Or just Stiles?”

Because tonight Stiles set half a dozen ghouls on fire with nothing but a rune and the power of her will and that should _not_ be possible for someone who didn’t even know magic existed a year ago. 

The older man cocks his head to one side, smiles thinly. “Is there a difference?”

+

John Stilinski is a problem. 

He’s also a solution, but mostly he’s a problem. Paradoxically, more so after he finds out about the supernatural than before. 

Before it was just sneaking round, lies, the occasional awkward run-in. Now the man shows up at the house, in full uniform, demanding to know what the hell is killing his people and where is his daughter?

The answer to both questions tends to be the same and he never likes that. “Goddamnit, Hale, they’re children.”

And Derek thinks about the photographs he saw once, of child soldiers in Africa. If the practice didn’t work, it would have ended generations ago. But it does and Erica was right. Derek needed soldiers. 

“Not anymore,” he counters, lets his eyes glow red. “We’ve got this covered. Don’t worry.”

A bitter laugh. “My daughter, Hale. That’s my daughter out there, fighting monsters with her friends. How the hell am I supposed to not worry?”

His phone rings right then and Derek answers to Stiles’ babble, Lydia muttering in the background. “We’ve got it. Come pick us up at the library? Bring my magic box from under the bed,” she commands, hangs up. 

He rolls his eyes, flips his phone back into his pocket and looks up at the greying sheriff. “Would you like to come along?” he asks.

It’s a rhetorical question. He can smell the man’s discomfort, his fear. He still flinches whenever Derek flashes red at him and even though he tries, for Stiles, he can’t deal with most of their reality. Old dogs and new tricks, perhaps. 

Derek doesn’t blame him. Afraid is the smartest thing a human in this world can be. 

A headshake. “I should head back to the station. Let me know where you’ll have your little showdown and I’ll keep my people away.”

Derek nods, grateful. “Thank you. That’s a great help.”

The sheriff nods back, leaves. He doesn’t ask about his daughter again. 

+

_List of Things I Hate_

Kate

Fire

Peter

Wolfsbane

Argents

Stiles

What I did

Fire

Late night TV

Not sleeping

Empty graves

What I didn’t do

+

He flushes that list, too, and decides, once and for all, to leave the mess inside his head exactly there. 

+

Peter keeps an apartment in town, but he lives at the house, no matter how loudly he claims otherwise. Since Isaac does, too, and Stiles and the others are there at least half the time, it’s rare for Derek to actually be alone with his uncle. 

But it happens, especially on weekday mornings, when the kids – god, Derek is sleeping with one of those kids – are at school. 

Sometimes, Peter makes breakfast and leaves it out for Derek to find. Sometimes they even coincide, eating side by side on the counter Stiles wanted in the kitchen, shoveling eggs or waffles the way only werewolves can. Fast. 

Every now and then, with the light slanting in through the windows in a certain way, with Peter breaking the silence with the odd comment about the newspaper he’s reading on his ipad, it almost feels like peace. 

Not like family, because there are a dozen people missing for that, not enough noise, or fighting over the syrup, no children playing tag between the chairs, no Grandma Hale to laugh at them all from her perch by the coffee machine. Not like family. 

But peace. 

In those moments, with Peter in the kitchen, the house still echoing with the rest of the pack, Derek feels something like peace. 

+

The night after Erica and Boyd die, Derek runs. He’s abandoning his pack, abandoning the sister he just found again, is failing _yet again_ , but he can’t take it anymore. 

He can’t stay there, can’t watch and _wait_ , wondering who will die next. Isaac perhaps, because for all his fighting prowess, he’s the weakest of them, the baby. Jackson, because he is still an outlier sometimes, still keeps himself that few, crucial inches away from the heart of the pack. 

Maybe it’ll be Peter, because he’s a threat, has knowledge and connections and experience that the alpha pack won’t like. 

Lydia maybe, just because they can. 

Or Stiles. 

He wonders if Erica still forgives him for this, if she was okay with dying at the age of seventeen, helpless and in pain, just because Derek needed soldiers and she was a convenient target. 

He wonders if Boyd hates him, if their ghosts are cursing him for damning them twice over, once when he turned them and a second time when he buried them in a deep and unmarked grave in the woods. 

Their families will never have closure. Their names will never be honored. In a few years, barely anyone will remember them anymore, the two repeat run-aways from Beacon Hills. 

No-one except Derek, who dug their graves with his own hands.

He’s so fucking tired of digging graves, lies awake, stares at his pack around him, at all those children he doomed to die young, at the way they cling to each other in their sleep, like puppies in the cold. 

He stares and sees only blood. 

So he runs. 

+

It’s Stiles who finds him, two days later, at the edge of the lake where he once saved her from drowning. He’s naked, dirty and exhausted to the point of weightlessly floating inside an aching body.

She’s on the bottom of his list of people who might find him, lower still on the list of people he wants to find him. Of course it’s her. Of fucking course. 

She drops down beside him, scoots sideways until her thighs are below his head, her fingers trailing up and down his neck.

“You done?”

He nods.

+

A week after that, she almost martyrs herself giving the darach enough power to even the fight for them. 

In the aftermath, with the Argents and her father looking on, he drags her into his lap, wraps bloody arms around her and growls at anyone who tries to take her away. 

Isaac doesn’t bother, just piles in close, his nose squished into the space between their shoulders. Jackson follows and with him comes Lydia. Scott, healed enough to move, goes to distract Allison. Cora joins the pile and then the twins, one helping the other, both their eyes flashing blue as they bare their necks to him.

Peter wedges himself against Derek’s back and somewhere, far off, the Sheriff asks, horrified and confused, “What are they doing?” Followed by, “Jesus, they’re all dead.”

Yes. Yes they are. 

Their packmates are avenged, their territory is safe. 

The enemy is dead, the threat neutralized. 

Derek closes his eyes and lets the scent of pack and blood fill his nostrils.

+

“I killed him,” he tells two lonely graves in the woods. “I killed him. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

+

Stiles moves in with him. So do the twins. Peter mostly gives up the pretense of living anywhere else and Isaac has always been there, anyway. 

Cora leaves. 

Allison and Chris move closer again, not back into Beacon Hills, but close enough. Scott spends a lot of time with them. It’s enough to keep his eyes bright. 

One night, during a run, Derek spots a strangely playful coyote.

Life goes on, and on, and on. 

Laura has been dead two years, the rest of his family eight. Stiles wears the moon on her back and sometimes wraps her hand around the nape of his neck until he goes still. She makes the tough decisions for him when he’s overwhelmed with choice, and when he hates them both for his weakness, she smacks him until he shuts up. 

“It’s okay to be okay, you know? You don’t have to be scowly-angry at everything all the time.” She grins, lopsided and jaded, “and you know that when I say we can’t have nice things I’m only joking, right? Because we can. They might not last, but we can have them.”

He doesn’t believe her. Not really. He wants to, though, and she knows it, rolls her eyes and lays down on her back so he can bury his face in her belly and pretend there’s nothing in the world but the beat of her heart and the rush of her blood. 

The last thing he hears is her voice again, almost too quiet, “You know you don’t have to hate yourself so much, don’t you?”

+

He dreams of Laura, the way she was before everything went so, so wrong. The way she was when she was Laura, not just meat, left to rot in the forest. 

She puts her chin in her hands and gives him a narrow glare, eyebrows drawn together. “You know she’s right.”

That’s alpha Laura, demanding obedience. 

But he’s an alpha now, too, her power in his veins. He shrugs. 

She sighs. “Oh, Der. You’re just all fucked up inside, you poor puppy.”

“I’m better,” he defends and it sounds pathetic even to his own ears, but Laura just nods. 

“Yeah, I guess you are. And your pack isn’t all that bad, either.”

She smiles, beatifically, like she used to, Before. “Look after each other, okay, bro?”

He ducks his head, nods. When he looks back up, his dream is just a dream again. Laura is gone.

+

“We should build a deck out back,” he says to Peter, apropos of nothing, on one of their quiet mornings, idly sipping his too sweet coffee. Peter always makes it like that. Stiles says it’s how Peter shows affection. 

His uncle hums in question, doesn’t look up from his ipad.

“For barbeques. Pack nights. It’d be good, I think.”

Finally, Peter looks up. He smiles. Derek keeps sipping his coffee and tries not hating himself.

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come [tumble](wordsformurder.tumblr.com) with me.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Achilles](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13644798) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton)




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